Typical surveillance systems that are used to secure buildings or borders about a secured area commonly include closed-circuit video cameras around the secured area, with concomitant power and signal cabling to video monitors for security personnel in attendance to observe video images for any changed circumstances. Additionally, lighting may be installed about the area, or more-expensive night-vision equipment may be required to facilitate nighttime surveillance. Appropriate alarms and corrective measures may be initiated upon observation of a video image of changed circumstances that prompt human analysis and manual responses. These tactics are commonly expensive for video cameras and lighting installations and for continuing labor expenses associated with continuous shifts of attendant personnel.
More sophisticated systems commonly rely upon image-analyzing software to respond to image changes and reject false intrusion events while segregating true intrusion events for controlling appropriate alarm responses. However, such sophisticated systems nevertheless commonly require permanent installations of sensors, lighting and cameras with associated power and cabling that inhibit rapid reconfiguration, and that increase vulnerability to breakdown due to severing of wiring and cabling, or to unreliable operations upon exposure to severe weather conditions.
In a wireless network of interactive modules, it may be desirable at times to update the software code that runs on the individual modules of the network. Since these networks may include perhaps hundreds of individual modules, manually loading the code can be time consuming and labor intensive for a field support person going to each module and via a portable processor transferring the new code to each module and then having each module restart with the new code.
In such wireless networks of interactive modules that self-adapt to changing transmission conditions, it is desirable to have most remote modules (also referred herein as ‘leaf nodes’) to conserve power while not interacting via transmitted or received signals by reverting to ‘sleep’ mode of operation. However, over long sleep intervals conditions for interactive communications may have changed. Accordingly, it is desirable to awaken a leaf node via an operating sequence that conserves power through operational procedures which analyze changed network conditions to restore interactive operation of the leaf node within the newly-configured network.